Participate

What would you like to do?Submit a link

Start a discussion

Tribe etiquette / rules

Please follow the tribe etiquette and rules below while participating in social activities.

All participants of this community must adhere to the global Snapzu community rules and etiquette below in order to keep this tribe orderly, respectful, and friendly. Breaking any of these rules may result in a ban from this tribe, or the suspension of your account as a whole.

- Don’t be abusive towards others
- Stay on topic (no off topic discussions)
- Share only relevant content
- Keep it civil and respectful at all times
- Keep it legal
- Absolutely no solicitation
- Observe copyright and trademark law
- No impersonations
- Protect your privacy
- Respect the privacy of others
- Do not spam
- Do not upload or post inappropriate content

After years of sales growth, major publishers reported a fall in their e-book sales for the first time this year, introducing new doubts about the potential of e-books in the publishing industry. A Penguin executive even admitted recently that the e-books hype may have driven unwise investment, with the company losing too much confidence in “the power of the word on the page.”

The LA Times Guild has been negotiating a new contract with the newspaper, but has hit a wall thanks to an unprecedented demand from the paper's owners: they want writers to sign away the rights to nonfiction books, novels, movies and other works they create separate from their reporting for the paper. The newspaper is also demanding the right to use reporters "byline, biography and likeness" to market these works.

“Without a book, so often the child is alone,” says Antonio La Cava. The retired schoolteacher converted his three-wheeled van into a mobile library, the Bibliomotocarro. Driving the hills and mountains of Basilicata, Italy, La Cava is able to reach children in remote villages like San Paolo Albanese, which only has two children of primary school age. “I was strongly worried about growing old in a country of non-readers.” La Cava believes that it’s important to spread the joy of literature to as many children as possible: “carrying out such action has a value, not only social, not only cultural, but has a great ethical meaning.”

It’s a tale as old as time, or, at least, the internet: None of us are reading any more, the physical book is dead, Amazon has killed the independent bookstore, and it’s all only going to get worse. But this year, the story looks like just that—a fiction. We are buying books—especially the kind with physical pages—and we’re doing so, increasingly, in well-loved indie bookstores.

I picked up All Systems Red on a Wednesday morning, meaning to read for five minutes, maybe ten. I'd picked it because there was a mean-looking robot on the cover and, obviously, I have a weakness for robot stories. Also, because it had the word "Murderbot" right there under the picture. All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries.

In May of 1967,” writes Patrick Iber at The Awl, “a former CIA officer named Tom Braden published a confession in the Saturday Evening Post under the headline, ‘I’m glad the CIA is ‘immoral.’” With the hard-boiled tone one might expect from a spy, but the candor one may not, Braden revealed the Agency’s funding and support of all kinds of individuals and activities, including, perhaps most controversially, in the arts. Against objections that so many artists and writers were socialists, Braden writes, “in much of Europe in the 1950’s [socialists] were about the only people who gave a damn about fighting Communism.”

Whether your interest is in winning arguments online or considerably deepening your knowledge of world cultural and intellectual history, you will be very well-served by at least one government agency from now into the foreseeable future.

A major survey of American authors has uncovered a crash in author earnings described as “a crisis of epic proportions” – particularly for full-time literary writers, who are “on the verge of extinction”. Surveying its membership and that of 14 other writers’ organisations in what it said was the largest survey of US authors’ earnings ever conducted, the Authors Guild reported that the median income from writing-related work fell to a historic low in 2017 at $6,080 (£4,760), down 42% from 2009.

During the Holocaust, Nazis referred to Jews as rats. Hutus involved in the Rwanda genocide called Tutsis cockroaches. Slave owners throughout history considered slaves subhuman animals. In Less Than Human, David Livingstone Smith argues that it's important to define and describe dehumanization, because it's what opens the door for cruelty and genocide.

Graphic design studio Super Terrain’s edition of Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi classic Fahrenheit-451 took the internet by storm, thanks to a video showing how its all-black pages become readable text when exposed to an open flame. (This will, and quite possibly should, also work with a hair dryer or something else not completely on fire.) And now, for only $451 — get it? — you can preorder one to keep on a specially-heated shelf in your home! If you have $451 to drop on an artist’s book, we figure you could have custom heated shelves.

What qualities must a book have to be considered science fiction? Genre categories can be helpful in guiding us toward works that we might like, or just are in the mood to read, but those definitions can be slippery, and many of the very best books defy conventions and upend expectations.

"Becoming" by Michelle Obama is not just one of the best-selling books of the past year — it is one of the hottest titles of the decade. The inspirational memoir by the former first lady has been on sale for more than two months, yet it is still No. 1 on Amazon's constantly updated list of best-selling books. Amazon said "Becoming" enjoyed the longest streak at No. 1 for any book since "Fifty Shades of Grey" came out in 2012.

Why am I here? How can I live a good life? What does it mean to have a mind and be a person? Since the days of antiquity, philosophers have puzzled over fundamental questions like these that sit at the very heart of our lived experience and interactions with the world. Solving these problems is not merely about increasing our knowledge of the world, to fill up academic textbooks and sit on library shelves, but to impart wisdom to aid us as we navigate through life's uncertainties and its profoundest mysteries.

It’s been a wild year for science fiction enthusiasts, as real life continues looking more like something out of an Arthur C. Clarke novel. Case in point: we just sent a robot to Mars and received a photo from it 8 minutes later. Here are our 10 favorite sci-fi books of 2018, from small-press debuts to Big Five bestsellers.

A few years ago, when people heard I was a reading researcher, they might ask about their child’s dyslexia or how to get their teenager to read more. But today the question I get most often is, “Is it cheating if I listen to an audiobook for my book club?” Audiobook sales have doubled in the last five years while print and e-book sales are flat. These trends might lead us to fear that audiobooks will do to reading what keyboarding has done to handwriting...

Only Jesus made his father more famous. Harper Lee’s father was actually named Amasa, but, by the end of his life, he was answering to “Atticus Finch,” a reflection of how closely the character was modelled on him and how wildly well known his fictional doppelgänger had become. When “To Kill a Mockingbird” was published, in 1960, it instantly—and seemingly irrevocably—entered the canon of American literature...